News

In December 2018, Distinguished Professor Venkatesan Sundaresan and his colleagues published in Nature a method that allowed them to produce clonal seeds directly from plants, bypassing the sexual reproduction process. Replicating this process in the lab could prove vital to providing the world’s farmers with high-yielding, disease-resistant or climate-resistant food crops.

For nearly two decades, Professor Julin Maloof has shined a light on biological knowledge for UC Davis students, introducing computational methods to the life sciences curriculum. For his dedication to his students, Maloof received the 2018-2019 Faculty Teaching Award.

As an adolescent, H. Michael Shepard was enamored with biology. The interest didn’t feel like a choice; it felt like a compulsion. In September, Shepard and his colleagues received the 2019 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for the groundbreaking foundational research that led to the creation of Herceptin.

Professor Mariel Vazquez has been appointed as the new faculty director of the Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science, or CAMPOS, succeeding the founding faculty director, Mary Lou de Leon Siantz, professor emeritus at the Betty Irene More School of Nursing.

Every summer, the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory offers summer classes to undergraduate students interested in coastal and marine sciences. Marine and Coastal Sciences student Tessa Filipczyk spent the summer taking classes and conducting her own research on the effects of clamming.

The BioLaunch Mentor Collective helps make the transition to the UC Davis campus easier for freshmen and transfer students. New students are paired with a returning UC Davis student, who can offer them advice and support across many areas of campus life.

As director of the Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute, Richard Grosberg oversees an interdisciplinary body that includes membership from the College of Biological Sciences, the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, the College of Letters and Science, the College of Engineering, the School of Law, the School of Veterinary Medicine and the Graduate School of Management.

UC Davis researchers have been awarded $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the first part of a project to develop a novel approach to deliver genome editing machinery to genes responsible for a rare form of familial cancer.

UC Davis alumnus H. Michael Shepard last Friday (Sept. 20) received one of the 2019 Lasker Awards, widely considered America’s top biomedical research prizes.

This fall, the College of Biological Sciences will launch the Advancing Diversity in Neuroscience Research (ADNR) Program to help grow diversity in biomedical, behavioral and clinical neuroscience research professions.